western books

We can thank the age of dime novels and western books for some of our favorite westerns today!  This brings up the age-old question- which is better: books or movies? Check them out and you tell us! Lonesome Dove After reading this 1,000-page novel with each page full of adventure, you’d realize why Lonesome Dove quickly...

Phoebe McFarland’s friends are taken aback when she announced she’d be leaving her comfortable job in northern California to work at a dude ranch in Arizona.  It was 1952.  Phoebe had lost her husband in the war and was feeling despondent, displaced, and disinterested in much of anything.  She believed the change would do her...

Roy Rogers and Dale Evans made their first movie together in 1944, and so began a dazzling partnership with a devoted public following that lasted 52 years. In this charming photographic biography, readers meet the talented young man and woman who would eventually become the royal couple of B-rated Westerns, a reign that would last...

Award-winning author Gayle Stewart pays tribute to equine heroes, film stars, rodeo performers, and athletes in her informative and exceptionally entertaining book 100 Horses in History: True Stories of Horses Who Shaped Our World.  The ways in which horses have contributed to mankind are significant and diverse. Stewart’s book includes more than eighty chapters on animals that...

This unique historical fiction novel is an intriguing story of Sadie Orchard, a real Old West character, born Sarah Jane Creech in Mills County, Iowa, in 1859.  Sadie chose a path of prostitution.  Little is known of her early days.  In 1886, she moved into Kingston, New Mexico Territory, speaking with a British accent and...

Mollyfar by Bonnie Hobbs is hard to put down.  Readers will find themselves turning pages as fast as they can to see what happens next.  In rural Texas, 1886, young Wade Devlin’s bullying father pushes him down a back alley for his first visit to a “soiled dove.”  He encounters innocent Molly Faro, desperate and...

In 2005, 50-year old Bernice Ende wanted to find out what kind of horsewoman she was, so she set out on a 5,000-mile ride.  Atop an 8-year old thoroughbred mare named Honor, Ende traveled from her home in Trego, Montana, to New Mexico.  Adorned in a broad-brimmed cowgirl hat and accompanied by her dog Claire,...